The career of Arthur Murphy (1727-1805) bears exceptional witness not only to the precarious financial and legal condition of dramatic authors in Georgian England, but also—and more importantly—to the theatre's capacity to reconceive the author's position within the burgeoning culture of print. Murphy, who was both a playwright and a practicing barrister, spent his entire career trying to redefine the professional status of dramatic authors. He failed in the law; he succeeded in the drama. The unlikely vehicle for his success was Hamlet, with Alterations (1772)—a play neither published nor performed in its author's lifetime. The play, a parody of Garrick's radical adaptation of Hamlet, succeeded not in changing the law but in changing the discourse about the relationship between a dramatic author and the commodity of a dramatic text.
In his dauntingly magisterial A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, whose four volumes appeared between 1939 and 1959, W.W. Greg declared Fulgens and Lucrece (1512-16?) to be the first drama printed in England. Not until the 1530s, however, as Greg's "Order of Plays" reveals, were dramatic texts printed regularly, although hardly frequently. The opening of the first public theatres in London in the 1570s created additional demand for printed drama, with a greater outpouring of published texts in the 1590s, coinciding with the Elizabethan playhouse in its noonday fullness. 1 The publication of drama in quarto continued until its rapid decline following the suppression of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, well after elaborate folio editions had been published of works by Ben Jonson (1616) and William Shakespeare (1623), while that for Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (1647) appeared a few years later, reflecting the popularity of play reading during the Interregnum. Folio editions, as is well known, were large luxury items designed as permanent additions to the private libraries of elite collectors and readers. Most of the hundreds of plays that were printed in early modern England appeared in smaller, cheaper, and more perishable quartos, about the size of a modern paperback. 2 The expanding corpus of printed drama in the Tudor and Jacobean periods raised questions of bibliographic control: What information about these texts was important? How would it be recorded and organized? Who 1 Yet as Peter W.M. Blayney cautions, "printed plays never accounted for a very significant fraction of the trade in English books" in the early modern period. Blayney, "The Publication of Playbooks," in A New History of Early English Drama, eds.
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